The greatest threat to the American people is our current monetary system lead by the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank.  By creating money and giving it to other banks at irresponsible rates, the FED has jeopardized the value of the dollar and made it possbile for the dollar to experience hyper-inflation and collapse.  The social turmoil that would result from such an event would be tremendous and threaten the foundations of American liberty.

Our first priority is to retake control of the Federal Reserve through Congressional action.  This is already underway thanks to Ron Paul’s popular Audit The FED Bill.  Once we have the FED under control, we can determine whether we want to abolish or modify the institution.

The US government should provide it’s citizens with some type of banking insurance.  The FDIC engenders confidence in the banking system and the dollar.  We need to increase FDIC coverage to $500,000 and reengineer banking regulations to ensure that FDIC covered banks remain solvent.

Our best insurance against collapsing banks and a declining dollar is creating parallel systems of value exchange that relies on neither entity.  We must legalize and support the emergence of local currency organically created by networks of individuals within geographic areas voluntarily agree to accept non-legal tender.  Local currencies allow a greater variety of transactions than normal currency and provide a layer of security and social cohesion in the unlikely event that hyper-inflation take place.

Without an empire to support, the American military can be redeployed to achieve it’s primary missions: to secure America’s boarders, uphold our Constitution and ensure no foreign military could harm our nation.

Due to the increasingly high level of economic integration between all nations, foreign invasion is highly unlikely.  What is not unlikely, in fact, what is a near certainty, is that individuals will attempt to attack American society.  The effectiveness of these attacks will depend on two factors: the damage the attack causes and the effect it has on the American people.

The best way to limit the damage an attack can cause on the American people is to make it difficult for individuals to acquire weapons of mass destruction.  It is possible, with the full strength of the US military, to ensure that nuclear and biological agents don’t enter the US from abroad and additional precautions can be taken to prevent powerful weapons from originating within.

The American population is our greatest resource to prevent attack.  We must make sure individuals within our country aren’t alienated by our communities, individuals outside our country view America positively and all peoples of the world view each other as one.  Dismantling our empire will enable us to realize these goals.  By nature, there will be alienated people who want to lash out against American society.  Our security forces must neutralize them.

Attack is inevitable but it’s effect on the American people is determined by our culture.  If we can preserve our nation’s love of freedom, no attack, not matter how devastating, can harm the promise of America.

American foreign policy has been designed by a group of special interests who willfully spend taxpayer money and lives for their selfish gain.  The only way to mitigate the influence of these interests on American international affairs is to operate a strictly principled foreign policy.  This policy must embody the same values as the US government: freedom and equality under the law.

American troops are stationed in over 130 countries around the world, costing taxpayers hundreds of billion of dollars a year and generating unquantifiable amounts of ill will among the peoples of the world.  Dismantling the America empire will create a power vacuum that another entity will inevitably fill.  That entity mustn’t be a coercive governing structure like the UN or WTO but rather, a universally applicable principle by which all national governments are judged.  This principle must be quantifiable.  It must be transparency.

Transparency is the ability for society to see inside government.  In a completely transparent nation, society and government are one.  It is in the American people’s interest to live in a world of transparent nations because transparency empowers civil society and enables democracy to flourish.

Democratic governments protect their citizens from exploitation and environmental degradation.  Empowered workers demand higher wages, giving Americans more of a competitive advantage.

The world’s peoples must construct transparency coalitions that rate national government and document electoral fraud.  They must then demand that their own national governments not recognize the opaque governments of other nations.

This type of decentralized, principled system of international governance is our best defense against the emergence of an autocratic one world government.

The platform is simple.

1. National Security: Bring all the troops home and redeploy them along America’s boarder.
2. Foreign Policy: Partner with transparent governments and peacefully support transparency activists.
3. Monetary Policy: Restrain the Federal Reserve, strengthen the FDIC and support local currencies.
4. Employment: Facilitate trade by eliminating employment  restrictions and encouraging micro-finance.
5. Healthcare: Give Americans savable vouchers so they can purchase their own healthcare coverage.
6. Education: Give students vouchers and create high quality open source education programs.
7. Taxes: Enact principled tariffs, a national sales tax, and state/local regulatory taxes.
8. Environment: Phase in a tax on fuels that produce carbon and invest the proceeds into mass transit.
9. Energy: Invest in the electrical grid and facilitate local energy production.
10. Crime: Mitigate black market activity through taxation, regulation and education.
11. Trade: Free trade with transparent nations, regulated trade with opaque ones.
12. Immigration: Institute a skills based immigration policy and make our boarders 100% secure.

All Americans, regardless of political association, support providing social services to the American people as efficiently as possible.  Network America will be faster, better, cheaper than Federally administered services, and exist without the coercive tax structure.  Thus the QS Platform should appeal to everyone.

Small government advocates appreciate how the Network America plan transitions the responsibilities our society has placed on the government to a parallel meta-organization that operates exclusively under the rules of market forces.  This drastically reduces the size and scope of government intervention into the lives of Americans, enabling those who create value to keep their property  while increasing the amount of social services to all.

Big government advocates appreciate Network America’s ability to provide every American with a high baseline (floor) of social services and makes it extremely simple for the people to decide whether they want the state to finance more services or less.  Network America has room for government run public options as well, as long as that option competes fairly with others.

Traditionalists appreciate how government has less influence on local culture.  Nationalists appreciate how boarder security is of paramount importance.  Internationals appreciate our formula for principled international engagement.

Network America is not about politics: it’s about whether Americans believe that free individuals using networking technologies can produce a more efficient and equitable society.

Properly networked and financed, nonprofit organizations can provide a more comprehensive set of social services to the American people than the government.  The technologies we need to create Network America are readily available and widely used.  What we’re lacking is a vision for an integrated nonprofit service network and a standard framework that organizes our use of these tools so each autonomous nonprofit organization can contribute to a more comprehensive whole.

Network America’s backbone is our network communication infrastructure (internet, cell phones, GPS).  This infrastructure enables organizations to use open source software that call on shared databases to deliver essential information on demand. Collaboration tools eliminate the barriers between individuals and organization, allowing people to work on projects instead of ‘for’ institutions.  Since services compete in the marketplace for donations and government vouchers, they must be efficient and transparent.

These organic organizations can only emerge under certain conditions:

1. Locally organized in response to the needs of the community.
2. Free from the corrupting influence of resources coercively extracted from one population and distributed to another.
3. Included in a collaborative network of similar organizations.
4. Entirely transparent.

Networked information technologies enable people to organize solutions to the collective action problems that, in the past, could only be solved by government.

These organizations already exist in every town in America – community centers, nonprofits, churches and social clubs have many of these characteristics – but they have yet to join a national network with the capacity to collaboratively scale best practice solutions to local challenges.

The construction of a meta-network that enhances the work of community organizations supported by voluntary contributions on a national scale constitutes a decentralized social service provider that operates completely independently of the government under free market principles.

We call it Network America.

Network America couldn’t exist in any other time because our technological base wasn’t advanced enough yet the concept has existed for many years.  In fact, an organic network of non-governmental social service providers existed before America instituted the income tax in 1913.

Between the Civil War and World War One, charity hospitals, usually associated to a religious organization, provided millions of Americans with free healthcare services and similar organizations provided education services to the nation’s children.  It was only after the income tax was instituted and our money supply was centralized in the Federal Reserve Bank did the government start providing these services and, as the government and tax burden grew, the organic, emergent, locally organized charitable providers starved due to lack of resources.

Free people have an abundant amount of faith because their every action expresses two fundamental economic principles that ensure that free people share best.  These principles are ‘trade creates wealth’ and the economic law of comparative advantage.

Trade creates wealth was first expressed by Adam Smith in his 1776 treatise “On The Wealth of Nations.”  This concept is obviously true: voluntary trade between two parties MUST create value for both parties because, if it didn’t, they simply wouldn’t make a transaction.  So, simply by engaging in trade, people generate value in the world: they create a net gain.  This net gain is described by the economic law of comparative advantage.

Comparative advantage “explains how trade can create value for both parties even when one can produce all goods with fewer resources than the other.”  This ensures that everyone, from the most unskilled laborer to the most sophisticated engineer, can create value in the marketplace by voluntarily exchanging goods and services.

People often confine the principles of ‘trade creates wealth’ and ‘comparable advantage’ to economics, but they have profound spiritual implication.  They deliver in sober economic terms the message that everyone is naturally valuable and the most value is created through collaboration and voluntary trade.

It’s important to realize that these economic laws are true under EVERY circumstance.  Trade ALWAYS creates wealth. People can ALWAYS engage in trade.  Everyone can ALWAYS create wealth.

Since value is, by definition, desirable and these economic concepts are always true, than any activity that prevents trade is never a rational decision.  Peace is rational.  War is always irrational.  Trade creates peace.  Peace creates trade.